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Change Locale of Site Variation Label in MOSS

Since some time, my customer had a nasty issue for which I did not see a solution at first. My customer is running its Intranet for years now on MOSS and uses a customized Publishing Portal with Site Variations in 3 languages, English, Dutch and French. The only problem with these Site variations is that the source Variation Label was created with the wrong Locale setting. The variation label was created with a name EN, language English (United States) , but with locale Dutch (Belgium) instead of English (United states).

Now when the hierachy was created, the subsite EN was created with the wrong locale. No problem there because you can change the locale of that particular subsite in the Site Settings – Regional Settings.

The problem my customer was facing is that clients targeting the root site collection and thus the Variation root site, where redirected to the wrong subsite if their browser had the locale Dutch (Belgium) defined. These client all ended up on the EN subsite instead of the Variation NL that was created with locale Dutch (Belgium).

The solution for this problem is to change the Locale in the Variation Labels in the root site. Unfortunately you cannot modify this value once the Variation Label is created (the field is greyed out). A possible solution would be to delete the Variation Label and recreate it. Because of the fact that this was the corporate intranet with lots of content on it, I did not feel very comfortable deleting the Variation Label, because this means you would have to delete the subsite as well before being able to recreate the Variation Label after which yould have to restore the subsite’s contents, etc. Furthermore the Variations system in MOSS is already very fragile and this would certainly break some other things.

Now after searching for a while and snooping around in the content database, I found out that these labels are stored in a hidden list in the Root site called, you’ll never guess, … “Variation Labels”. Now my trick for accessing this a hidden list by just typing the URL like http://intra.contoso.com/Lists/Variation Labels/AllItems.aspx did not work.

Powershell to the rescue!

I was able to access the list and change the locale value for the specific Variation Label with the following set of powershell commands:

Now if you ever need to chaneg the locale value, then this script will help you out. The only thing you need to find out is the value for your specific language. What I did to find out the specific value was to create a new Variation Label on my test environment with teh locale I wanted and fetched that value with the exact same commands.